DeSantis may have been embroiled in an unusual number of these controversies, but it’s what every Republican candidate worries about these days. What if some supporter of mine says something shockingly racist? What if that guy who introduced me at that rally turns out to be a klansman? What if I get endorsed by some neo-Nazi group?

But you know who doesn’t have to worry about getting endorsed by neo-Nazis, white nationalists and racists? People who don’t give neo-Nazis, white nationalists and racists any reason to believe that they share their views.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

How fascism works
A Yale philosopher on fascism, truth, and Donald Trump.

Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader.

Sean Illing's question:
This is probably a good time to pivot to the glittering elephant in the room: Donald Trump. Is he a fascist?

Jason Stanley's answer:
I make the case in my book that he practices fascist politics. Now, that doesn’t mean his government is a fascist government. For one thing, I think it’s very difficult to say what a fascist government is.

For another thing, I think the current movement of leaders who use these techniques (Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, to name a few) all seek to keep the trappings of democratic institutions, but their goal is to reorient them around their own cult of personality.

Again, I wouldn’t claim — not yet, at least — that Trump is presiding over a fascist government, but he is very clearly using fascist techniques to excite his base and erode liberal democratic institutions, and that’s very troubling.

But the blame there is as much on the Republican Party as it is on Trump, because none of this would matter if they were willing to check Trump. So far, they’ve chosen loyalty to Trump over loyalty to rule of law.

Sean Illing
In the book, you imply that there’s something inherently fascist about American politics, or at the very least that fascism has always been a latent force in America. Can you elaborate on that?

Jason Stanley
Well, the Ku Klux Klan deeply affected Adolf Hitler. He explicitly praised the 1924 Immigration Act, which severely limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the US, as a useful model.

The 1920s and the 1930s was a very fascist time in the United States. You’ve got very patriarchal family values and a politics of resentment aimed at black Americans and other groups as internal threats, and this gets exported to Europe.

So we have a long history of genocide against native peoples and anti-black racism and anti-immigration hysteria, and at the same time there’s a strain of American exceptionalism, which manifests as a kind of mythological history and encourages Americans to think of their own country as a unique force for good.

This doesn’t make America a fascist country, but all of these ingredients are easily channeled into a fascist politics.

Quote:Originally posted by second:
Trump is retweeting the persistent falsehood that the economy turned on a dime when he won the election and that all of the so-called experts who said it was impossible for the economy to grow this fast were wrong.

“We have the greatest economy ever in the history of our country. So we’re very happy with the way things are running, generally speaking. I don’t think we’ve ever had an economy like this.”
— President Trump, Sept. 19, 2018

Cruz was a leading supporter of the Republican tax cut plan that passed the Senate last December on a 51-48 party-line vote. He also has rolled out legislation to make permanent the law’s cuts to individual income tax rates, which, unlike the corporate tax cuts, are set to expire in 2025.

“We’re seeing enormous benefits as a result of the historic tax cuts passed last year,” Cruz said in April. “Texans are investing capital, expanding businesses, hiring new workers, and raising wages, and that economic growth is benefiting middle class families across the Lone Star State.”

O’Rourke, on the other hand, has criticized the $1.5 trillion tax package, saying it will deepen deficits, provides large cuts for corporations and the wealthiest of Americans, and gives only small breaks to middle- and low-income families.

In a tweet on the eve of the final Senate vote, O’Rourke warned that it would become a 2018 campaign issue: “If Republicans pass this tax bill, there will be consequences & an election where the voters of Texas hold them accountable,” he wrote.

But ahead of the November midterm elections, Cruz and his Republican allies in Washington have celebrated the economy’s continued strength, which they attribute in large part to the tax cuts - the signature victory of Trump’s first year in office.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Getting voters to the polls was the unspoken theme of Cruz-O’Rourke debate

Cruz painted an image of Texas values being under assault from a socialist wave, with O'Rourke in the mold of Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, billionaire socialist financier George Soros and former first lady Hillary Clinton.

The goal was to cast Beto O'Rourke as a threat to the Texas way of life, said Rice University political science professor Mark P. Jones.

Cruz drove home the point when he told O'Rourke during one exchange that being there for Texans means fighting for them, and "not George Soros, not big liberal interests, but fighting for the values of Texas."

Later Cruz was asked to say something positive about O'Rourke. He responded in terms calculated to fire up his own base.

"Bernie Sanders believes in what he's fighting for, he believes in socialism," Cruz said from the stage at McFarlin Auditorium at Southern Methodist University. "Now I think what he's fighting for doesn't work, but I think you are absolutely sincere, like Bernie, that you believe in expanding government and higher taxes — and I commend you for fighting for what you believe in."

(O'Rourke calls for banning some types of guns, legalizing marijuana, preserving Obamacare and defending athletes who kneel during the national anthem. Polls show a majority of Texans disagree with him on those issues.)

Professor Jones said for O'Rourke it was about presenting himself to black voters as a credible champion on those issues and enough of an ally that it's worth showing up in big — even historic — numbers to vote for him on election day.

Turnout in Texas mid-term elections has generally been among the worst in the nation. In 2014, just 4.6 million of Texas's then 14 million voters cast ballots in the midterm elections. That's just 34 percent of the state's registered voters and 25 percent of the voting age population in Texas. No midterm race has had more than 40 percent turnout since 1998.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Americans have a longstanding love of magical thinking.

“The country got its start with people believing that they could create their own world, their own truth.”

That’s what Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, told me during our conversation about America’s descent into what he calls “anything-goes relativism” — a willingness to buy into delusion and falsehood.

His book argues that Americans have always been devoted to the fantastical — from early settlers searching for gold to conspiracy theories about the Freemasons to hustlers like P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill.

The 1960s, for Andersen, were a particularly pivotal moment because people began to experiment with different ways of understanding the world, which was initially liberating. But “we became too loose with the truth,” he argues, and “that came back to bite us.”

The question is, why? What is it about the American experience, the American character, that cultivated this love of magical thinking? Why are so many of us committed to our own tailored versions of reality?

In the 1830s, for example, we had newspapers publishing hoaxes as though they were news and religious evangelists going around the country advertising themselves in newspapers and performing as though it was a night at the theater. This accelerated in the 19th and especially the 20th century with Hollywood and television. America has collapsed the space between entertainment and news, reality and unreality, serious and unserious. This “fantasy-industrial complex” is more than Hollywood and TV. The 2008 financial collapse is an example.

The financial industry became part of the fantasy-industrial complex because they were selling a fantasy of real estate, a belief that people with lousy credit should be given giant loans, that home values would just keep going up without fail. That was pure fantasy, propped up by a country conditioned to believe anything.

Real estate, finance, the gaming industry, religion, and so many other things are part of the fantasy world we’ve created and live in. Have we lost the ability to distinguish reality from fiction or do we not give a damn? I’m actually not sure we can separate those two things. People don’t care if it’s real or fake; they just want to be entertained. I think that’s the attitude people have about damn near everything now — politics, theater, professional wrestling, sports, you name it.

Quote:I’ve been familiar with Trump for a long time, and I was one of the first people to write about him back in the ‘80s. I started paying attention to him before a lot of other people did. There’s nothing there. He’s a showman, a performance artist. But he’s a hustler like P.T. Barnum.

As I was writing this book in 2014 and 2015, I saw that Trump was running for president and I realized, about halfway through the book, that I had to reckon with this stupid — but deadly serious — candidacy.

Watching it was strange, though. I was finishing the book and getting to the part about modern politics, and here’s Trump about to win the nomination. It was as though I had summoned some golem into existence by writing this history, of which he is the apotheosis. Donald Trump came along and now this conversation is much easier to have because we’ve got this guy as president, who is the perfect expression of our disconnectedness from reality.

Quote:The question is, why? What is it about the American experience, the American character, that cultivated this love of magical thinking? Why are so many of us committed to our own tailored versions of reality?

Advertising and Hollywood.

Like so many other aspects of our culture ("greed is good"), this aspect would not be fostered and would not continue to exist if it didn't ADVANTAGE THE WEALTHY. There is a driving elitist reason behind this culture; it didn't "just happen".

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:The question is, why? What is it about the American experience, the American character, that cultivated this love of magical thinking? Why are so many of us committed to our own tailored versions of reality?

Advertising and Hollywood.

Like so many other aspects of our culture ("greed is good"), this aspect would not be fostered and would not continue to exist if it didn't ADVANTAGE THE WEALTHY. There is a driving elitist reason behind this culture; it didn't "just happen".

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

Humans are very hackable creatures. But the trick to keep the hackers out of your head (be they politicians, preachers, or businesses doing the hacking) is to recognize when you are being hacked. If you are too lazy or indifferent to understand what the hackers are doing to you, then the safest thing is to disconnect from the network. I am familiar with that disconnecting from my time with the Jehovah's Witnesses, who are told to not vote and not to join the military. I am also familiar with being mentally hacked by Nixon, who convincing me, without ever knowing me, to volunteer for Vietnam. I am reminded daily what will happen to me if I allow myself to be hacked or if I disconnect from the network: either painful injury or loss of money or isolation. A guy like Trump couldn't hack I guy like me because I have known Trump-like characters. The real Trump @realDonaldTrump has a long history of saying whatever is necessary to close a deal. Once you have signed the contract, or voted for him, or joined his army, then you find out that you are trapped inside another of his swindles, which go back 40 years.

Quote:The question is, why? What is it about the American experience, the American character, that cultivated this love of magical thinking? Why are so many of us committed to our own tailored versions of reality?

Advertising and Hollywood.

Like so many other aspects of our culture ("greed is good"), this aspect would not be fostered and would not continue to exist if it didn't ADVANTAGE THE WEALTHY. There is a driving elitist reason behind this culture; it didn't "just happen".

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

Humans are very hackable creatures. But the trick to keep the hackers out of your head (be they politicians, preachers, or businesses doing the hacking) is to recognize when you are being hacked. If you are too lazy or indifferent to understand what the hackers are doing to you, then the safest thing is to disconnect from the network. I am familiar with that disconnecting from my time with the Jehovah's Witnesses, who are told to not vote and not to join the military. I am also familiar with being mentally hacked by Nixon, who convincing me, without ever knowing me, to volunteer for Vietnam. I am reminded daily what will happen to me if I allow myself to be hacked or if I disconnect from the network: either painful injury or loss of money or isolation. A guy like Trump couldn't hack I guy like me because I have known Trump-like characters. The real Trump @realDonaldTrump has a long history of saying whatever is necessary to close a deal. Once you have signed the contract, or voted for him, or joined his army, then you find out that you are trapped inside another of his swindles, which go back 40 years.

Quote:Humans are very hackable creatures. But the trick to keep the hackers out of your head (be they politicians, preachers, or businesses doing the hacking) is to recognize when you are being hacked.

Okay, SECOND, here's a tip: You're ALWAYS being hacked. ALWAYS. The fact that you believe that there are times when you AREN'T being "hacked" indicates that you still don't understand it.

Quote: A guy like Trump couldn't hack I guy like me because I have known Trump-like characters.

But a guy like you can be, and quite obviously has been, hacked by anti-Trump/anti-GOP characters.

So, what is the answer to being "hacked"? Is it running to the "anti" side and sticking to it like glue? If you (the generic "you") were religious, does it mean becoming vehemently anti-religion? If you were fat, does it mean becoming anorexic? If you were socialist does it mean becoming vehemently anti-socialist?

Isn't clinging to the extreme opposite being just as "hacked" as before?

I'm not one to say that the truth is always in the middle. If some people say that 2+2=6 and some people say that 2+2=8, the truth isn't that 2+2=7. But there ARE ways to figure out "the truth", and in the case of politics and economics (where society-wide experiments aren't possible) you can always test a theory by how much it explains (is it able to explain contradictory information?) and - even better- by how much it PREDICTS.

You have obviously figured out an algorithm for accumulating money. Now let's see if you can figure out an algorithm for predicting events. (And no, I don't mean events that everyone can see coming, like "Republicans are going to reduce taxes on the wealthy", I mean predict things that most other people haven't predicted yet.)

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

Quote:Originally posted by SECOND: A guy like Trump couldn't hack I guy like me because I have known Trump-like characters. The real Trump @realDonaldTrump has a long history of saying whatever is necessary to close a deal. Once you have signed the contract, or voted for him, or joined his army, then you find out that you are trapped inside another of his swindles, which go back 40 years.

A bit similar here. I wanted to be a writer, was an English major in college. For some basic expense money I got a job in a photo store where the owner was a living breathing salesman - hardcore, studied all the sales techniques and endlessly applied them to the unsuspecting shoppers who would come into the store. I watched him closely as a character study for writing. He made me realize there is a giant world of selling most of us know nothing about. The psychology of selling, the tricks, the manipulations, the ability to make people buy something they didn't want when they walked in, but when they left minus hundreds of dollars they were grateful to you for making them do so!
I'd always been wary of sales people so this was on top of that. The people I meet that are Trump supporters are so naive about sales people. He makes them want to believe. They are the same schlups who didn't want to buy the cheap lens when they walked in but left with it and paid 200% more than normal mark-up and were grateful for the "deal." They loved the PoS lens they just bought. Some day it'll dawn on them if they're honest enough.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

During his second speech ever before the U.N. assembly, Trump opened by making his oft-repeated proclamation about his tenure in office, though those in attendance did not appear to take him seriously.

"In less than two years my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country,” Trump said.

Laughs slowly rose up in the crowd, and Trump responded: “So true. Didn’t expect that reaction.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

On Monday, good government groups released a heavily redacted and previously confidential Trump administration memo from April outlining and authorizing what would ultimately become the White House’s disastrous family separation border policy.

The memo, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Open the Government and the Project On Government Oversight, mentions a series of options that were presented to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen on April 23 for how to approach the Justice Department’s “zero tolerance” policy on prosecuting undocumented border crossers.

Contrary to Nielsen’s public statements, the memo made clear that this was a family separation policy. Nielsen seems to have misled Congress and the American people when she repeatedly claimed that there was no policy of separating families at the border.

The policy in question resulted in more than 2,500 children being taken unlawfully from their parents by the Trump administration before it was halted by a federal court in June as a violation of the due process clause of the Constitution. After the court ordered that separated families be reunified, it was revealed that hundreds of parents were deported without their children. The administration is still in the process of attempting to reunite those families — as of last week at least 182 potentially eligible children had not been reunified with their parents.

At the time that the policy was falling apart, though, Nielsen was publicly insisting that no such policy existed.

The U.S. labor market is hot. Unemployment is at 3.8 percent, a level it’s hit only once since the 1960s, and many industries report deep labor shortages. Old theories of what’s wrong with the labor market — such as a lack of people with necessary skills — are dying fast. Earnings are beginning to pick up, and the Federal Reserve envisions a steady regimen of rate hikes.

So why does a large subset of workers continue to feel left behind? We can find some clues in a new 296-page report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of advanced and advancing nations that has long been a top source for international economic data and research. Most of the figures are from 2016 or before, but they reflect underlying features of the economies analyzed that continue today.

In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.

Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.

Poor Jack. He is upset and claims I keep calling him stupid without providing any evidence. That's so funny because it's what he posts that is the evidence. But alas, he is to stupid to figure that out without help.

Quote:Originally posted by THG:
Poor Jack. He is upset and claims I keep calling him stupid without providing any evidence. That's so funny because it's what he posts that is the evidence. But alas, he is to stupid to figure that out without help.

Can someone here give the moron a hint?

T

Every post you reply to anyone is an insult. Every single one.

You must be really frustrated at losing all the time man. Once again, I'll advise that you try to distance yourself from your ideology and try to become an individual with things you enjoy to do and try to improve things in your life that are within your ability to do so.

Quote:Originally posted by SECOND:
The punchline is that you have no rights at a job, 6ixStringJack, even if you are a citizen. That is not how it works in the rest of the world, except for the U.S. and Mexico, which probably explains why you are hostile to Mex-skins -- they are in competition for the kinds of crappy, low pay jobs you work. Is it great to be a worker in the U.S.? Not if you are in the lower 50% of jobs and not compared with the rest of the developed world.

I've got the best job out of anybody here, hands down.

I don't need money. At what they pay me vs. my output, I'm likely the most valuable person in that store, dollar for dollar. I'm certainly far and away the most valuable person in the store at my level at any rate. I call my own schedule and everybody is thrilled when I come back after 8 days off. I'm saving about $6,000 a year. I know it doesn't seem like much to a billionaire like you (lol), but your average American can't even afford to pay for a $500 emergency, and I could cover an additional one of those every month that passes by and I've got more than 50% of my days to do whatever the hell I want to do with them. Even taking time out of my day to banter with chucklefucks like you in the RWED.

Take your high wage / high stress jobs and shove 'em up yer ass.

I'm not hostile to Mexicans. My step-dad is Mexican, and he disagrees with the Leftist's take on immigration. His family did it the right way and he resents people who come in illegally and leech off the system.

You should probably stop talking for other people now, since you have no idea what you're talking about.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I've got the best job out of anybody here, hands down.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You are fantasizing. This is real. This is no joke:

What if President Trump did popular stuff on policy? For 6ixStringJack, what if Trump signs a bill to hike the minimum wage to $12 an hour? 6ix's "best job out of anybody here" would be even better!

Up until now, Trump has governed like a very hardline conservative except on trade. But except for authoritarian views on immigration and crime, Trump doesn’t have any personal history of consistency as a conservative. And even during his 2016 campaign, he put forth a much more eclectic, heterodox version of himself than how he’s governed.

Maybe that won’t change no matter what happens in Election 2018. Maybe he’s a true prisoner of the conservative movement. Maybe he’s always harbored Heritage Foundation sympathies and they are just now blooming. But I think a reasonable person should have some humility about his ability to foresee the future and admit that a bipartisan, populist Trump is at least a possibility.

What if President Trump did popular stuff on policy? For 6ixStringJack, what if Trump signs a bill to hike the minimum wage to $12 an hour? 6ix's "best job out of anybody here" would be even better!

Up until now, Trump has governed like a very hardline conservative except on trade. But except for authoritarian views on immigration and crime, Trump doesn’t have any personal history of consistency as a conservative. And even during his 2016 campaign, he put forth a much more eclectic, heterodox version of himself than how he’s governed.

Maybe that won’t change no matter what happens in Election 2018. Maybe he’s a true prisoner of the conservative movement. Maybe he’s always harbored Heritage Foundation sympathies and they are just now blooming. But I think a reasonable person should have some humility about his ability to foresee the future and admit that a bipartisan, populist Trump is at least a possibility.

I've spent the last two years putting my life back together. I love my job. I get along with everyone I work with. I'm the best at what I do by anywhere from a factor of 2 to a factor of 5, depending on who we're talking about.

Maybe I am fantasizing, but I'm living the fantasy. I don't think I've ever been happier in my life than I am now. Shame I couldn't find what I've found now when I was in my 20's and before I caused myself so much irreversible damage like my teeth that will be replaced soon, but what are you gonna do? Nobody but myself to blame for that, and as they say "youth is wasted on the young".

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I do hope you find whatever it is you're looking for. You probably don't even have a clue what that is. I know that I didn't.

Here is a clue. I am looking for a Firefly story, among other things. River Tam is the secret troubleshooter (take that literally, not figuratively) for the Elon Musk of the 'Verse with a plan to resettle 10 million people on Earth. River is being paid nothing, and she might get everyone on Serenity killed, and she won't be asking their permission for endangering them, but she isn't stopping until she is either dead (death is not a permanent condition in SF) or she is traveling on the last starship leaving for Earth with everyone she loves. She's exactly the kind of violent, energetic person I admire, with a strong purpose and a practical plan, but she is not the unfocused, meandering River Tam we know from the comic books, TV or movie. Happiness is not one of her goals, or she would be taking life easy like 6ixStringJack.

I do hope you find whatever it is you're looking for. You probably don't even have a clue what that is. I know that I didn't.

Here is a clue. I am looking for a Firefly story, among other things. River Tam is the secret troubleshooter (take that literally, not figuratively) for the Elon Musk of the 'Verse with a plan to resettle 10 million people on Earth. River is being paid nothing, and she might get everyone on Serenity killed, and she won't be asking their permission for endangering them, but she isn't stopping until she is either dead (death is not a permanent condition in SF) or she is traveling on the last starship leaving for Earth with everyone she loves. She's exactly the kind of violent, energetic person I admire, with a strong purpose and a practical plan, but she is not the unfocused, meandering River Tam we know from the comic books, TV or movie. Happiness is not one of her goals, or she would be taking life easy like 6ixStringJack.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I wish you luck. Keep shooting for the stars then. Just don't let it make you miserable along the way.

Taking it easy works for me. I got 4 more nights of working my ass off, then I'm going to have 8 days to do whatever I feel like doing. :)

Do Right, Be Right. :)

There actually is a political question built into the backstory for Firefly. How did the governments of China and America get the billion surviving humans off the Earth and to the 'Verse? I don't think those governments succeeded. Oh, they might have gotten billions of human embryos to the 'Verse, but probably only thousands of full grown people. There wasn't enough profit to move everybody on Earth.

The Alliance does not want it known that their greatest triumph wasn't as great as the legend because the structure of the Alliance in both the 21st and 26th Centuries has not changed much. Politics was motivated by profit and greed in 21st Century and, in the 'Verse, it still is. Since there is no profit to sending an expedition back to Earth, the Alliance has not done it. That is why America does not have Moon base, unlike in the movie 2001 made 50 years ago. No profit in sending people long distances. And the farther you go, be it light hours to Mars or light years to another star, the less believable an eventual profit becomes. It will take a totally different kind of government than has ever been created by real politicians to move millions of people to another star. An Alliance between China and America can't do it. The organization of those two governments is too conventional, which explains why those governments cannot do more ordinary things that are far easier than going to the stars.

Quote:Originally posted by SECOND:
There actually is a political question built into the backstory for Firefly. How did the governments of China and America get the billion surviving humans off the Earth and to the 'Verse? I don't think those governments succeeded. Oh, they might have gotten billions of human embryos to the 'Verse, but probably only thousands of full grown people. There wasn't enough profit to move everybody on Earth.

The Alliance does not want it known that their greatest triumph wasn't as great as the legend because the structure of the Alliance in both the 21st and 26th Centuries has not changed much. Politics was motivated by profit and greed in 21st Century and, in the 'Verse, it still is. Since there is no profit to sending an expedition back to Earth, the Alliance has not done it. That is why America does not have Moon base, unlike in the movie 2001 made 50 years ago. No profit in sending people long distances. And the farther you go, be it light hours to Mars or light years to another star, the less believable an eventual profit becomes. It will take a totally different kind of government than has ever been created by real politicians to move millions of people to another star. An Alliance between China and America can't do it. The organization of those two governments is too conventional, which explains why those governments cannot do more ordinary things that are far easier than going to the stars.

I can't argue any of that.

I'll take it a step further though and say that this is also another problem with the overpopulation of the planet, as is often the case with many of our problems today. I know that didn't happen overnight, and we probably never had a Government that was capable of reaching for the stars in the history of man, but with the current situation I just don't see how we could ever have one that would.

When people talk about the "conspiracy theory" Agenda 21 (or Agenda 2030), I kind of find myself believing that this is actually a thing. Any of the details are probably much different than anything this theory suggests, but I can't imagine that the leaders of our Governments haven't realized that this is a problem that is only going to grow if something isn't done about it.

Do I find it scary? Yeah... a little maybe. But I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I don't think the means are going to be anything violent, and certainly not genocide. I think for the large part it's going to be voluntary, even if people are unaware they're volunteering. I've talked before in here about how my own child was aborted many years ago without my say so. I was devistated at the time and I kept that to myself for years and it tore me up. Finally talking about it here and real life was probably one of the best things I've ever done, even though I really spiraled out of control with my addictions immediately afterward. But just like I've come to terms with the fact that I'm going to lose my teeth, I've made peace with this. I probably never will see her again in my life, but I don't hate her anymore. I had to stop hating myself before I could let go of that hatred though.

But back on topic, I'm still young enough to father children if I cared to. Short of the teeth needing to be replaced, I'm pretty damn healthy and I'm looking great again, especially for my age. I just don't have any interest at this point in my life of even finding companionship, let alone raising kids. I know quite a lot of people my age who have never had kids. Of the ones that do, they only have one. Many of them came from families with 2 or 3 siblings, and their parents came from families with 4 to 6.

Without any real Biblical ties these days, at least in America, there really isn't any reason to have a lot of kids, or any at all. Certainly not with the cost of living and raising children being what it is. I think this is a trend that will pick up even more steam with the Millennial generation, and become even more prevalent with Generation Zed. As the rest of the world that was 3rd world is becoming more educated at a rapid pace with the internet spreading everywhere, I imagine that population growth planet-wide will be a thing of the past even at some point in my own lifetime.

If I were the powers that be, I'd be shooting for around 500 Million people tops. Would that solve all the world's problems? I don't think so, but at least there would be plenty to go around for everyone in theory.

At that point, I think that a great government could arise that would have the resources and the will of the people at their disposal to dream again.

Political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartel argue against the “folk view of democracy: that we are all these rational, NPR-listening voters that have opinions about policy issues and will vote for representatives that best reflect our policy preferences.” Their research suggests that we instead pick a political party — a team — and support whatever policies our team advocates for.

Achen and Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters, even those who are well informed and politically engaged, mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly.

Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government.

Jonathan Haidt’s book on moral psychology argues that our political decisions are much less rational than we’d like to believe, but broadens the scope of view not just to politics but to cognitive activity in general. It’s very depressing if you actually believe in democracy.

Drawing on his twenty five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong.
Is it wrong to get this book from a bit torrent? Click the link and make your decision: https://katcr.co/katsearch/page/1/The%20Righteous%20Mind

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Trump is arguably the most unlikely, unsuitable, and unpopular presidential nominee of a major party in American history. He is a businessman, specializing in marketing the Trump brand; a reality television star, with no experience whatsoever in public office or the military; and a relatively recent convert to the Republican Party. Before entering the 2016 presidential campaign, he was best known in the political world for championing the “birther” movement denying President Obama’s citizenship. During his months of campaigning, he has evidenced scant knowledge of American domestic and foreign policy, few fixed (much less considered) views on issues confronting the country and the world, and a temperament that appears to be an exceptionally poor fit with the position of president of the United States. In the felicitous words of my Brookings colleague Ben Wittes, “Trump’s speeches reflect a degree of grandiosity, narcissism, impulsivity, lack of self command, and instinct to attack his political opponents that are unusual even within the end-of-the-bell-curve emotional zone reserved for politicians.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Meh... Only by a couple million votes, and in all the wrong places.

Please don't get me started on the Electoral College again.

I'll just pretend that I didn't expect you to reply exactly the way that you just did.

Have a nice day. :)

Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, closer to 3 million more for Hillary than Trump. You rounded the number down to 2 million. I know Trump won the electoral college vote, but Hillary got 47.5% to Trump's 48% and 100% of Pennsylvania's electoral college. Who designed that system where nobody gets a majority, but the minority candidate still receives 100% of the vote? Something weird going on there.
www.nytimes.com/elections/results/pennsylvania

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Liberals are dedicated to ruining everything good about America and they have the power of Hollywood and universities and the press to provide cover. A Conservative's timeline of the Failure of America:
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/09/637469/

1) Starting in the early 60, liberals start up a culture war — and over the next 50 years they win it. We make huge strides in feminism, in civil rights, and LGBTQ rights. At the same time, conservative lore insists that we banned prayer in public schools, we removed religious symbols from public buildings, we forced schools to hire gay teachers, we insisted on making buildings accessible to the disabled, we supported anti-white affirmative action in universities, we approved gay marriage, we sued everyone we can think of to make sure women made the same wages as men for the same job, and much more. At the same time, movies, TV, and universities pounded messages of over-the-top tolerance into our kids. Conservatives didn’t just lose the culture wars, they got their asses completely kicked.

2) For obvious reasons, white Republicans, especially older ones, are especially upset about this. And what makes it worse, they can’t get away from it. If they go to the movies, they see it. If they read a newspaper they see it. If they watch a TV show, they see it. It really does seem like it’s some kind omnipresent dark cloud of oppression engineered by smug liberal elites that can out-talk them and out-legislate them time and time again. They feel helpless.

3) Most of these changes seem inexplicable enough to ordinary people that it’s easy for them to be convinced that liberals are deliberately trying to weaken America. Women in the military? Black kids going to Harvard even if their SATs are 200 points too low? Hollywood movies that bash America and then get released abroad? And gay rights? That’s the final straw. Ordinary working-class folks — especially outside the cities — have grown up thinking that gay sex is degenerate, and now liberals want to advertise it far and wide. This is scary, morally decayed stuff, and in 2015 liberals actually persuaded the Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage nationwide! But what if your conscience doesn’t allow it? Tough luck. You issue the certificate or you’re out of a job. Ditto for hospitals and abortions. Ditto again for Obamacare and its individual mandate.

4) If it’s really true that liberals are deliberately trying to weaken America — and there seems to be plenty of evidence, doesn’t there? — then clearly this is a very powerful, very rich, very coordinated movement, most of which is probably hidden from view. And if they’ll do all the stuff you can see on the surface, God only knows what they’re trying to do beneath the surface in their shadowy meeting rooms in New York and Washington DC. It’s pretty plausible that they really do have control of the IRS. That they really did tell the Air Force to stand down and let the Benghazi tragedy unfold. That maybe FEMA really does have a plan for concentration camps. Or that liberals have the skill and power of a James Bond villain to construct a perfectly conceived and implemented plan to bring down Brett Kavanaugh in just a few days.

5) Evangelicals, who have been on the losing end of practically every aspect of the culture wars, and who are losing membership as their elder statesmen either retire or die, have been especially dispirited. In the middle aughts and during the Obama administration they were so distraught that many of them were ready to give up completely. But then, out of nowhere, came Donald Trump. Sure, he might not personally be the most religious guy in the world, but he brought them hope anyway. He was loud, he loved Christianity, and he promised to do everything they wanted. It was a miracle, and he was their savior. This is why evangelicals are his biggest supporters, all his faults notwithstanding.

Bottom line: if you believe Liberals are not just the opposition but are constantly working to destroy conservatism and weaken America, you’ll believe almost anything about them.

I'll just pretend that I didn't expect you to reply exactly the way that you just did.

Have a nice day. :)

Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, closer to 3 million more for Hillary than Trump. You rounded the number down to 2 million. I know Trump won the electoral college vote, but Hillary got 47.5% to Trump's 48% and 100% of Pennsylvania's electoral college. Who designed that system where nobody gets a majority, but the minority candidate still receives 100% of the vote? Something weird going on there.
www.nytimes.com/elections/results/pennsylvania

You'll get no argument from me that the system is flawed and outdated. It does need to be revised and if there is anything shady going on in certain areas then it needs to be investigated.

I don't agree at all with a pure popular vote, but the system as it is designed is over 200 years old and needs to be revamped. Most people who vote for President are just throwing it away entirely because they live in a state that would NEVER go the other way. I'm one of them. I have been in every state I've lived in since I've been old enough to vote. Any presidential vote I've ever made has been entirely meaningless and I might as well have put Daffy Duck for President.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again... Why didn't the Obama administration make this one of the FIRST things on the docket when the Dems had a majority in both the house and senate?

That's another problem I have with the Democratic Party. They'll endlessly bitch and moan when they lose because of the Electoral College, but they seem to get collective amnesia when they win and nobody thinks to even bring it up.

Y'all know that there ain't no way in hell that the Republicans are going to do anything about it. Why don't you demand that something be done about it when the Democrats are in power?

I think the more important question is why don't the Democrat politicians ever think to ever do anything about it themselves?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I don't agree at all with a pure popular vote, but the system as it is designed is over 200 years old and needs to be revamped. Most people who vote for President are just throwing it away entirely because they live in a state that would NEVER go the other way. I'm one of them. I have been in every state I've lived in since I've been old enough to vote. Any presidential vote I've ever made has been entirely meaningless and I might as well have put Daffy Duck for President.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again... Why didn't the Obama administration make this one of the FIRST things on the docket when the Dems had a majority in both the house and senate?

That's another problem I have with the Democratic Party. They'll endlessly bitch and moan when they lose because of the Electoral College, but they seem to get collective amnesia when they win and nobody thinks to even bring it up.

Y'all know that there ain't no way in hell that the Republicans are going to do anything about it. Why don't you demand that something be done about it when the Democrats are in power?

I think the more important question is why don't the Democrat politicians ever think to ever do anything about it themselves?

6ixStringJack, you know how the system works. It needs a super-majority of 67 in the Senate to rewrite the Constitution. It even needs a super-majority of 60 to pass ordinary legislation if the opposition party objects. The Federal government was designed to fail on any controversial issue. That’s how Madison and Jefferson put it together. It’s in the basic design. That’s why the US has had centuries of major friction, with the loud screeching of metal against metal, on all big issues.

There have been four efforts to abolish the electoral college. All have been by Democrats. All efforts were thwarted by Republicans. Republicans are always there to stop it from happening in either Congress or at the state legislatures. Until there are 33 or fewer GOP Senators, it cannot happen. Even then it might not happen because there have been three asshole Democrats who also prevented change for the better (Democratic Senators James Eastland of Mississippi, John McClellan of Arkansas, and Sam Ervin of North Carolina) but, thankfully, they are all dead and burning in hell along side of those Democratic Senators who resigned to join the Confederacy in 1860 and 1861. I pray that they all suffer eternal pain for their wholehearted speeches defending the worst decisions in American history.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Texas Republicans scoff at Democratic predictions of a blue wave and brag that GOP dominance in state politics isn’t subject to anti-Trump sentiment fueling elections across the country this year.

One reason the GOP is so comfy: Texas is one of just eight states still offering “straight-ticket” voting, a shortcut that allows voters to click one box at the top of the ballot and automatically register votes for a single party’s candidates in every race — as many as 100 offices in some counties. It’s a practice that’s going out of style across the U.S. but one proven to help Texan Republicans sweep statewide elections over the past two decades.

Nearly two-thirds of the voters in the state’s most populous counties automatically voted the full Democrat or Republican ticket in the last two major elections, according to the Center for Public Political Studies at Austin Community College.

Lawmakers in 2017 voted to phase out straight-ticket voting after November elections, so it won’t be a factor in 2020. In the meantime, political analysts say the practice will likely create a safety net this year to help GOP statewide candidates weather a surge of momentum from a re-energized Democratic Party.

On the other hand, nearly half of the straight-ticket voters in 2016 cast ballots for Democrats, an 8 percent increase over the gubernatorial race in two years before. If that growth continues into the midterm election, this could be the year straight-ticket voting helps Democrats in contentious races in the House of Representatives, including three in the Houston area and two in San Antonio.

Straight-ticket voters stick to their brand much like some people are loyal to one make of a car, said Peck Young, director of Center for Public Policy and Political Studies who has studied decades of voting trends. That loyalty is one of the reasons Republicans dominate Texas politics and consistently sweep the top of the ticket, he said.

I don't agree at all with a pure popular vote, but the system as it is designed is over 200 years old and needs to be revamped. Most people who vote for President are just throwing it away entirely because they live in a state that would NEVER go the other way. I'm one of them. I have been in every state I've lived in since I've been old enough to vote. Any presidential vote I've ever made has been entirely meaningless and I might as well have put Daffy Duck for President.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again... Why didn't the Obama administration make this one of the FIRST things on the docket when the Dems had a majority in both the house and senate?

That's another problem I have with the Democratic Party. They'll endlessly bitch and moan when they lose because of the Electoral College, but they seem to get collective amnesia when they win and nobody thinks to even bring it up.

Y'all know that there ain't no way in hell that the Republicans are going to do anything about it. Why don't you demand that something be done about it when the Democrats are in power?

I think the more important question is why don't the Democrat politicians ever think to ever do anything about it themselves?

6ixStringJack, you know how the system works. It needs a super-majority of 67 in the Senate to rewrite the Constitution. It even needs a super-majority of 60 to pass ordinary legislation if the opposition party objects. The Federal government was designed to fail on any controversial issue. That’s how Madison and Jefferson put it together. It’s in the basic design. That’s why the US has had centuries of major friction, with the loud screeching of metal against metal, on all big issues.

There have been four efforts to abolish the electoral college. All have been by Democrats. All efforts were thwarted by Republicans. Republicans are always there to stop it from happening in either Congress or at the state legislatures. Until there are 33 or fewer GOP Senators, it cannot happen. Even then it might not happen because there have been three asshole Democrats who also prevented change for the better (Democratic Senators James Eastland of Mississippi, John McClellan of Arkansas, and Sam Ervin of North Carolina) but, thankfully, they are all dead and burning in hell along side of those Democratic Senators who resigned to join the Confederacy in 1860 and 1861. I pray that they all suffer eternal pain for their

My point is that they don't even try. In 8 years of Obama being in office, the question wasn't even brought up once. Not a single Democrat I ever saw online said "hey, we've got a majority in the house and the senate. We should at least put this to a vote and when it gets shot down there is a legitimate conversation about it". I think it would be the proper time to bring awareness to the issue, yanno, when the Democrats are actually "winning" instead of bitching about it years after the fact that they lose again because of it.

I think the problem is that in the past they've tried to outright abolish the Electoral College. I'm 100% against that idea myself. But as I said many times here in the last decade plus, I am 100% in support of starting a real conversation about how this needs to be revamped. I don't know how many people were living in the country when it was first instituted, but I'm half sure that they had no idea there would be 320 million people being represented by this system of voting one day when it was.

One day, the Democrats will have all three positions of power again, though I doubt we'll ever see a super majority in my lifetime. I hope that maybe next time we can bring this to the table and at least make people aware of it when that time comes.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The blockbuster New York Times report on the Trump family’s history of fraud is really about two distinct although linked kinds of fraudulence.

On one side, the family engaged in tax fraud on a huge scale, using a variety of money-laundering techniques to avoid paying what it owed. On the other, the story Donald Trump tells about his life — his depiction of himself as a self-made businessman who made billions starting from humble roots — has always been a lie: Not only did he inherit his wealth, receiving the equivalent of more than $400 million from his father, but Fred Trump bailed his son out after deals went bad.

One implication of these revelations is that Trump supporters who imagine that they’ve found a straight-talking champion who will drain the swamp while using his business acumen to make America great again have been suckered.

But the tale of the Trump money is part of a bigger story. Even among those unhappy at the extent to which we live in an era of soaring inequality and growing concentration of wealth at the top, there has been a tendency to believe that great wealth is, more often than not, earned more or less honestly. Not true. Tax evasion, almost by definition, doesn’t show up in official statistics, and the super-wealthy aren’t in the habit of mouthing off about what great tax cheats they are. To get a real picture of how much fraud is going on, you either have to do what The Times did — exhaustively investigate the finances of a particular family — or rely on lucky breaks that reveal what was previously hidden. One break was the Panama Papers.

Matching information from the Panama Papers and other leaks with national tax data, researchers found that outright tax evasion actually is a big deal at the top. The truly wealthy end up paying a much lower effective tax rate than the merely rich, not because of loopholes in tax law, but because they break the law. The wealthiest taxpayers, the researchers found, pay on average 25 percent less than they owe — and, of course, many individuals pay even less.

The corruption isn’t subtle; on the contrary, it’s cruder than almost anyone imagined. It also runs deep, and it has infected our politics, quite literally up to its highest levels.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

There are roughly three competing visions within the party about how to move forward: 1) Go the way of Bernie Sanders and appeal to working-class voters with progressive policy ideas; 2) go the centrist route in a bid to grab moderate, suburban independents and Republicans who might have voted for Trump but can be persuaded to jump ship; or 3) double down on the 2008 and 2012 strategies and hope to recreate the Obama coalition of women, minorities, and young people.

These are all nonstarters.

No policy platform is going to win three or four consecutive national elections for Democrats because we know policy isn’t what decides elections; that’s not how most voters make decisions.

There are no policy changes that are going to reverse the overall trajectory that this society is on right now. A lot of people still think there’s some meaningful connection between policy outcomes and voter decisions, but there’s a good bit of political science research to suggest that’s just a fantasy. (Most voters don’t have anything like coherent preferences. Most people pay little attention to politics; when they vote, if they vote at all, they do so irrationally and for contradictory reasons.)

The idea that we deliver benefits to people and they’re going to be like, “Thank you for everything that you’ve done, let me return you with a larger majority next time,” is just nonsense. It’s the wrong way to think about politics.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do things for people, but we’ve got to be serious about how elections are won. And they’re not being won on the basis of policy proposals or policy wins.

The Constitution is a shockingly short document, and it turns out that it’s extremely vague on some key procedures that we rely on to help government function at a basic level. For the government to work, cooperation between parties is needed. But when that cooperation is withdrawn, it creates chaos.

We’ve seen a one-sided escalation in which Republicans exploit the vagueness or lack of clarity in the Constitution in order to press their advantage in a variety of arenas — from voter ID laws to gerrymandering to behavioral norms in the Congress and Senate. What the Republicans did to Merrick Garland was one of the most egregious examples ever seen. They essentially stole a seat on the Supreme Court — a swing seat, no less. But they correctly argued that they had no clear constitutional obligation to consider the president’s nominee for the seat.

This is the sort of maneuvering and procedural warfare the Republicans have been escalating it for two decades. And they’ve managed to entrench their power through these dubious procedures.

The result is that the structural environment is biased against Democrats and the Republicans have engineered it that way.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

It takes a special kind of guts to press ahead with a nominee as unpopular as Kavanaugh. Republican were sloppy and poor at vetting him.

Obama and the Democrats showed political skill in managing to select Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, two well-liked and scandal-free Supreme Court nominees.

Meanwhile, during that same period of time, Democrats actually seemed extremely ruthless and effective in getting laws passed while Republicans were curiously poor at stopping them. Democrats crafted a vast expansion of federal health care spending, raised taxes on corporations and the rich, and nationalized the student loan industry — and that was just in one bill.

Separate legislation completely overhauled federal financial regulation. They passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“the stimulus”), plus a couple of extra smaller stimulus bills and then a couple more during the lame-duck period. They repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” ratified a landmark arms control treaty, passed federal hate crimes legislation, and reformed and expanded the federal school lunch program.

Congress for the first time allowed the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, forced new disclosure on credit card companies, established a small national public service initiative, passed the biggest public lands bill in generations, expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program, made it easier for plaintiffs to pursue pay discrimination claims, and even passed some kind of shark conservation law.

This is actually a lot more than Republicans have gotten done in 2017–’18. You could chalk it up to Democrats being more ruthless, though I think it more likely shows that Democrats are simply more interested in policy activism. More to the point, Democrats had bigger congressional majorities, so they could get more done. Vote counts matter.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

It is always, for me, a special privilege to address the women of this Party. First of all, for a very practical reason, they tell me there are more women in the United States than there are men. But secondly, I have the most deep conviction that a political party can be called such only if its whole purposes are soundly based in some moral and spiritual values.

The women of this nation are more concerned in their day by day work, I think, than are men with these values. They have the job of rearing our young, those youngsters who are so dear to all our hearts, and they want them to grow up with the right kind of values embedded in them so that as they meet the problems of life they will always have a certain kind of principle, or doctrine, or belief to fall back on that will help guide them through the rough spots.

I think the women, therefore, must be concerned with these values, and I return to my statement that if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Uh huh.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Are you gonna "uh huh" the immoral part of this one? How much money is Trump is personally getting from the Saudi government?

It’s not the only instance of a foreign state putting money directly into Trump’s pockets with disturbing implications for the conduct of US foreign policy. The only way to find out how often it happens or what policy choices it’s linked to would be to get a Congress that bothers to care.

A foreign government — an American ally, no less — probably just murdered a US resident with impunity while he’s on the soil of a NATO member state because they didn’t like his newspaper columns. And yet, Trump explained to reporters on Thursday that he does not want to respond to the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi because “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money coming into our country” and “I don’t like stopping an investment of $110 billion in the United States.”

Trump’s nonchalance is getting some pushback from Congress, which is welcome, including some actual action from Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who has often complained about Trump but rarely done anything. While a little tension between a Senator and the White House on this subject is welcome, it leaves unexamined the elephant in the room. Why is Trump so willing to let the Saudis slide? Is Trump getting paid by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? Is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner?

Normally, these would be absurd questions to raise about a president. But Trump has commented before on his business ties to Saudi Arabia, bragging at a campaign rally in Alabama about how much business he did with Saudi interests. And he’s never fully aired the extent of his vast business and financial ties.

Now, as the White House is preparing to make policy (or not) in a crucial moment, how can the public have any confidence that the president isn’t immorally looking out for just his own interests and not the country’s?

Trump told reporters that because Khashoggi disappeared in Turkey, and because he is a permanent resident of the US but not a citizen, it’s no big deal. US intelligence agencies are leaking like sieves trying to make the opposite point, getting word out to the American public that the American government has solid evidence that things are exactly as they appear, and that the Saudi government was behind the mysterious disappearance and likely murder of Khashoggi.

The Clinton Foundation's History of Controversy - Pacific Standard
https://psmag.com/news/whats-going-on-with-the-clinton-foundationJan 24, 2018 - The FBI's latest probe into the foundation may seem like a political witch hunt, but there ... It has since grown from an organization to raise funds for the Clinton ... Saudi Arabia alone has contributed $10 million to $25 million

All FIREFLY graphics and photos on this page are copyright 2002-2012 Mutant Enemy, Inc., Universal Pictures, and 20th Century Fox.
All other graphics and texts are copyright of the contributors to this website.
This website IS NOT affiliated with the Official Firefly Site, Mutant Enemy, Inc., or 20th Century Fox.